Lady’s Hipster Brooklyn Guide

Today I want to bring you my guide to hipster Brooklyn. Like London’s Shoreditch and Peckham, this borough in New York City is a great place to channel your inner hipster.

Hipster Brooklyn

With the help of my cousin and her fiance—I’m staying with them in Clinton Hill—I start on my quest to become a bona fide Brooklyn hipster.

They direct me to Williamsburg, the home of hipster Brooklyn and the most famous place for finding things to do, wear, buy, and be seen in. I head straight there.

Hipster Williamsburg

I start my hipster metamorphosis at a quirky Brooklyn shop that has gigantic sandwiches with names like Scuttlebutt and signs saying “Hair Pulling $1” and “We could’ve used a girl like you at the Alamo” (they could’ve!).

It has a row of stools and a narrow counter that sits under a large plastic crustacean, and that’s about it. But the sandwich is as good as my cousin promised, and I find myself enjoying a soft landing in hipster Brooklyn.

Next door I discover Milk Bar, a hole-in-the-wall shop selling—among other things—milk. Obviously. But this isn’t just any milk. This is momofuku milk. And given the famous restaurant group’s reputation, it’s probably the best milk in New York.

But hipsters don’t just eat. They also live. And down the street I discover how to do that in style.

A home goods shop has all the mid-century modern furniture I could ever need to furnish a Williamsburg apartment, and Arbor Vitae has vintage clothing with $5 sale racks that won’t break my hipster trust fund.

Sweatshop, with its open-air space and neon sign, will allow me to pretend I can relate to actual sweatshop workers as I sit shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow Brooklyn hipsters pretending to do whatever it is we do at a coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon at 3pm.

Hipster Greenpoint

And Williamsburg isn’t the only part of hipster Brooklyn, either. Greenpoint has its share of hipster markets and legendary vintage stores like The Thing, a jumble of a shop with mountains of old records.

Hipster Bushwick

Furthermore, according to my cousin, Bushwick is the “new” Williamsburg.

There’s not much to see there apart from coffee shops with hipsters in their natural habitat, but if I really want street cred I need to relocate to Bushwick to earn it.

Hipster Brooklyn: The Verdict

But am I actually ready to go that far in pursuit of my new hipster identity? Or can I find enough back in London to satisfy my needs?

With hipster Hackney on the rise and pop-ups galore in London Fields, I might just risk heading home to the UK.

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